AN EXTENDABLE VISUALIZATION AND USER INTERFACE DESIGN FOR TIME-VARYING MULTIVARIATE GEOSCIENCE DATA

Geoscience data has unique and complex data structures, and its visualization has been challenging due to a lack of effective data models and visual representations to tackle the heterogeneity of geoscience data. In today’s big data era, the needs of visualizing geoscience data become urgent, especially driven by its potential value to human societies, such as environmental disaster prediction, urban growth simulation, and so on. In this thesis, I created a novel geoscience data visualization framework and applied interface automata theory to geoscience data visualization tasks. The framework can support heterogeneous geoscience data and facilitate data operations. The interface automata can generate a series of interactions that can efficiently impress users, which also provides an intuitive method for visualizing and analysis geoscience data. Except clearly guided users to the specific visualization, interface automata can also enhance user experience by eliminating automation surprising, and the maintenance overhead is also reduced. The new framework was applied to INSIGHT, a scientific hydrology visualization and analysis system that was developed by the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources (NDNR). Compared to the existing INSIGHT solution, the new framework has brought many advantages that do not exist in the existing solution, which proved that the framework is efficient and extendable for visualizing geoscience data. Adviser: Hongfeng Y

AN EXTENDABLE VISUALIZATION AND USER INTERFACE DESIGN FOR TIME-VARYING MULTIVARIATE GEOSCIENCE DATA

Geoscience data has unique and complex data structures, and its visualization has been challenging due to a lack of effective data models and visual representations to tackle the heterogeneity of geoscience data. In today’s big data era, the needs of visualizing geoscience data become urgent, especially driven by its potential value to human societies, such as environmental disaster prediction, urban growth simulation, and so on. In this thesis, I created a novel geoscience data visualization framework and applied interface automata theory to geoscience data visualization tasks. The framework can support heterogeneous geoscience data and facilitate data operations. The interface automata can generate a series of interactions that can efficiently impress users, which also provides an intuitive method for visualizing and analysis geoscience data. Except clearly guided users to the specific visualization, interface automata can also enhance user experience by eliminating automation surprising, and the maintenance overhead is also reduced. The new framework was applied to INSIGHT, a scientific hydrology visualization and analysis system that was developed by the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources (NDNR). Compared to the existing INSIGHT solution, the new framework has brought many advantages that do not exist in the existing solution, which proved that the framework is efficient and extendable for visualizing geoscience data. Adviser: Hongfeng Y

Volunteered Geographical Information: an Alternative Solution for Overcoming the Chasm Between Stormwater Management and Community Participation

It is a dramatic challenge to promote public engagement in stormwater management and green infrastructure initiatives. When traditional outreach approaches made important influence on public engagement, their limitations are also obvious. With the development of Web 2.0 technology, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has been emerging as one of the most important user-generated geographic contents. The crowdsourcing data that generated by volunteers through geo-web, smartphones, and other geo-devices provides invaluable mass data for decision-making. VGI can provide a better understanding of planning issues and other challenges. The research aims to develop a mobile information platform to allow citizens to report the information of the green infrastructure sites and activities through their mobile devices. This study shares the experiences and lessons of the “U.S. Green Infrastructure Reporter” in national grassroots engagement of stormwater management and green infrastructure initiatives. “U.S. Green Infrastructure reports” in this study has collected over 6,800 reports of 11 types of Green Infrastructure across the U.S. The findings can help investigate both the potential of VGI in urban water management and its challenges regarding to data reliability and quality. We conclude with recommendations for future development of the advancing technology of VGI in enhancing water resources planning capabilities and future research directions. Advisor: Zhenghong Tan

Dryad Data

Detailed data for Chinese snake

Path Planning System for Smart Cars Used in Education

In this paper, we developed a path planning system for smart cars for teaching electronic engineering or computer science, which consists of the interactive platform for smart cars development and path planning. Designed by Visual C++, the interactive platform can call Matlab engine, allows users to choose path optimization algorithms such as genetic or A-star(A*) algorithm for different tasks and control smart cars through serial ports. The simulation and practice demonstrate that our interactive platform can help learners to plan paths and control intelligent vehicles without specially designing a user interface.Peer reviewe

Bayesian inversion of frequency-domain airborne EM data with spatial correlation prior information

The Bayesian inversion of electromagnetic data can obtain key information on the uncertainty of subsurface resistivity. However, due to its high computational cost, Bayesian inversion is largely limited to 1-D resistivity models. In this study, a fast Bayesian inversion method is implemented by introducing the spatial correlation as prior information. The contributions of this article mainly include: 1) explicitly introduce the expression of spatial correlation prior information and provide a method to determine the parameters in the expression through the variogram theory. The influence of parameters in the spatial correlation prior information on the inversion results is systematically analyzed with the 1-D synthetic model. 2) The information entropy theory of continuous functions is introduced to quantify the degrees of freedom (DOF) of the parameters of the spatial correlation prior model. The analysis shows that the DOF of model parameters are significantly smaller than the number of model parameters when spatial correlation prior information is introduced, which is the main reason for the rapid Bayesian inversion. 3) Introducing the Sengpiel fast imaging algorithm, combined with the variogram theory, realized the direct acquisition of spatial correlation prior information from the observation data, minimizing the dependence on other information. The inversion results of 1-D and 2-D synthetic models and field datasets show that considering the spatial correlation prior information, hundreds of thousands of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling steps are needed to enable the inversion of up to thousands of model parameters. This result provides a possible idea for future Bayesian inversion of complex 3-D models

Effects of calcination and acid treatment on improving benzene adsorption performance of halloysite

In this paper, calcination and subsequent acid treatment were performed on halloysite to investigate their effects on dynamic benzene adsorption performance. Calcination at 800 degrees C had little effect on halloysite's tubular morphology, but it caused dehydroxylation and phase separation of amorphous SiO2 and Al2O3. The occurrence of dehydroxylation resulted in removal of hydroxyl groups, which reduced halloysite's hydrophilicity, leading to an improvement in the halloysite's affinity for hydrophobic benzene molecules. The dynamic benzene adsorption capacity increased from 68.1 mg/g in the original halloysite to 103.6 mg/g in the calcined halloysite. The acid treatment after pre-calcination preserved the halloysite's tubular morphology and introduced massive micropores as a result of the rapid dissolution of Al2O3 layers. The emergence of these massive micropores substantially improved the specific surface area and dynamic benzene adsorption capacity of the acid-treated calcined halloysite, which reached 472.3 m(2)/g and 204.2 mg/g, respectively. In addition, the recycling efficiency of the acid-treated calcined halloysite for benzene adsorption reached 92.5%, thus displaying good regeneration performance. These results demonstrate that calcination and subsequent acid treatment play important roles in promoting the halloysite's benzene adsorption performance, which makes the resulting halloysite a promising adsorbent for the treatment of volatile organic compounds